Erich Owens

Modernizing drone vision software for customer and insurer property understanding and protection needs

• Building AI/CV systems for geospatial intelligence, roof damage assessment, and property analytics

Managed a team of mobile and ML engineers putting the latest in ML/CV/LLMs into Facebook's composer and creation tools, also powering the intelligence behind camera roll recommendations.

• Integrated cutting-edge computer vision and language models into Facebook's content creation pipeline
• Shipped AI-powered editing features to billions of users across Facebook mobile apps
• Built intelligent camera roll recommendation systems using state-of-the-art ML models

Responsible for Asset Pipeline Fashion and use of GPT-3/Stable Diffusion for Avatar Customization. Managed engineering managers and recursively led a team of 40 software engineers across avatar pipeline, 3D geometry, technical art, and avatar ML.

• Pioneered use of GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion for AI-powered avatar customization at Meta scale
• Built and scaled complete avatar asset pipeline supporting Meta's entire VR ecosystem
• Led recursive management structure overseeing 40+ engineers across multiple specializations
• Shipped ML-powered avatar generation enabling personalized virtual identities for millions

Responsible for the CV/ML technology powering face technology at Facebook—the mobile face tracker used in all AR platforms, the FACS-based expression tracker puppeteering avatars and driving expression recognition, and audio-based viseme-predicting lipsync.

• Built mobile face tracker deployed across all Meta AR platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Messenger)
• Developed FACS-based expression tracking system for avatar puppeteering and emotion recognition
• Shipped audio-based viseme prediction for realistic lipsync in AR experiences
• Powered Instagram AR effects used by millions of users daily with production-grade face tracking

Responsible for effect curation and recommendations. Hired art curators as specialists and augmented their reach with search and exploration tools to explore manifold of Spark creators and find the most avant-garde and technology-pushing effects.

• Built galleries, allowlists, blocklists, and live personalized ranking for AR effects
• Hired and empowered art curator specialists to identify cutting-edge creative work
• Developed search and exploration tools enabling curators to discover innovative Spark creators
• Improved discovery of high-quality AR effects, increasing engagement and creator retention

Managed a team of AI research engineers responsible for embodied agents, compressed sensing through deep learning on MRI images, and open-sourcing AlphaZero solution (ELF OpenGo).

• Led fastMRI project (github.com/facebookresearch/fastMRI) in partnership with NYU Langone Radiology
• Released open-source dataset, modeling competition, and technology proven in human trials
• Managed research on embodied agents and deep learning for MRI compressed sensing
• Open-sourced ELF OpenGo, Meta's AlphaZero implementation

A founding engineer on Facebook Spaces, the first Social VR app on Facebook. Developed end-to-end "build avatar that looks like me from a tagged Facebook photo" system in two months, then began management career by hiring many ex-Pixar technical artists and engineers to overhaul avatar system.

• Built complete avatar-from-photo system in just 2 months for Facebook's VR debut
• Recruited ex-Pixar technical artists and engineers to create best-in-class parametric avatar system
• Shipped company's best-reviewed avatars (FastCompany: "Facebook's VR Avatars Just Got A More Realistic Upgrade")
• Used AI to power speech and auto-generation with neural-net based face tracking, color/style classification, and laughter recognition
• Launched Facebook Spaces to public, establishing Meta's presence in social VR

Building 8 skunkworks hackamonth. Developed use of LIDAR-powered Social VR simulation room scans, and developed peltier coolers on VR controllers for experiencing hot and cold in VR.

• Built LIDAR-based room scanning system for photorealistic Social VR environments
• Invented thermal haptics using peltier coolers on VR controllers ("fire and ice in VR")
• Explored cutting-edge VR input modalities and spatial scanning technologies

Built VR simulations for VR designers pre-hand-controller launch

• Used VR to design VR experiences, accelerating product development cycles

Overhauled comment ranking for quality and civility using semantic similarity for relevance, Thompson sampling for intelligent and thrifty exploration of inventory, and co-authored the Turing-complete PNLambda config language for controlling mathematically-heavy ranking configs at Hack runtime.

• Built Commentology tool for cross-team understanding—still used company-wide a decade later
• Co-authored PNLambda, a Turing-complete config language for complex ranking mathematics
• Applied Thompson sampling for efficient exploration of comment ranking space
• Significantly improved comment quality and civility across billions of daily comments
• Created tools enabling buy-in and understanding across product and engineering teams

Responsible for ranking of public content based on quality. Used "people read this article" signals, authoritative authorship, skepticism of engagement rates, first embedding signals, and ML classifiers for understanding public news shared on Facebook.

• Built first CV-based News Feed personalization (hackathon win and patent: "hide babies from News Feed")
• Demoted feed spam and promoted original high-quality articles using quality signals
• Pioneered use of computer vision and embedding signals in news ranking
• Created JS-powered visualization tools plus Presto SQL for rapid counterfactual experimentation
• Filed patent on visual content personalization in social feeds
• Published News Feed FYI posts: Showing Fewer Hoaxes, Cleaning Up News Feed Spam, Showing More Timely Stories

Entity disambiguation, industry/subject prediction, news clustering, recommendation system

• Linked 500k users by semantic content; enabled personalized news discovery

Network visualizations of company interrelationships, text mining, unsupervised learning for cluster analysis

• Built visualization tools for understanding company ecosystems

Taught AP Calculus to highly-motivated secondary students

• Shared mathematical foundations with next generation

Stochastic and partial differential equations research

• Contributed to mathematical research in probability theory

Systems engineering on Project Constellation

• Contributed to NASA's next-generation spacecraft program

X-ray crystallography, powder diffraction, superelastic materials for cardiovascular implants

• Research on medical device materials